Project Muse Again

loorung

If I have a PDF of a recent Project Muse article on my computer then drag it into Zotero (as opposed to downloading using the site translator), I find that Zotero cannot retrieve the metadata. I expect this on old pre-2000 PDFs which I think are graphical, but I would have thought 2011 PDFs from a major repository would have the metadata embedded or Zotero could read the file.

Am I doing something wrong, or is it a problem with Project Muse or Zotero? And is there a solution?

adamsmith

Zotero doesn't read the embedded metadata for pdfs (which is very limited and not standardized anyway) - it queries CrossRef (if there is a doi) or Google Scholar (for a string of the article).
If you provide a link to the paper in question we can see why it's not working (you can assume that most of us have Muse access).

loorung

This is the link to the article. N.B. It's not just this article I find the same problem with other Project Muse articles:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_world_history/summary/v022/22.3.stewart.html

Note: If I click on the site translator in my address bar it downloads and retrieves metadata perfectly. It's only a problem when I already have the PDF on my computer (such as when a friend emails me an article) and I drag and drop the PDF into my Zotero library.

adamsmith

yeah, so everything works like it's supposed to be, but Zotero doesn't find the article in google scholar. It looks for this:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22but%20%E2%80%9Ca%20plurality%20of%20Enlightenments%20which%20cannot%22%20%22grouped%20together%20and%20unified%20by%20the%20employment%20of%22%20%22article.%E2%80%9D%201%20In%20spite%20of%20that%20well-known%20shift%20in%20scholarly%22%20&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

and doesn't get a hit. I can think of two reasons:
1. The article is very new - even when you search for its title in google scholar it doesn't come up as an early search result.
2. Project Muse - as opposed to other databases like JSTOR - doesn't allow google scholar to crawl its full texts, so google doesn't find strings in the full text.

Sorry, but I don't think there's anything that can be done. For what its worth, that PDF also doesn't have any embedded tags, so even if Zotero were able to read those that wouldn't help.

loorung

Solved:

Thanks for the hint. I've just downloaded then drag and dropped a 2008 PDF from the same journal on Project Muse. Zotero has retrieved the metadata perfectly. So it looks like the original article is just too new for Google Scholar.

Thanks once again.